Holographic Universe Updated

When Michael Talbot wrote The Holographic Universe the whole theory was considered far fetched and on the fringe. I liked the theory at the time, even though it was considered "silly" by mainstream physics. Since that time I haven't really been paying much attention to the latest advances in physics, so I was surprised when I got a book for my birthday and read it.

The book, The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics, tells a fascinating tale of how an "impossible" idea proposed by Stephen Hawking caused a big stir in the physics community that ended up changing just about everything about our understanding of how the world works.

In the process, the Holographic Universe theory ended up becoming the most widely accepted mainstream theory, and was finally accepted even by that one stubborn hold-out, Stephen Hawking himself.

Not only that, but laboratory evidence for the holographic universe is actually being discovered now.

While the author of the book is an atheist and has no belief in a soul or an afterlife, it's interesting that the details of the newest incarnation of the holographic theory provide all the mechanism for the not only the existence of holographic matter and energy, but a holographic soul as well. It has been proven that "information is never destroyed", and what is the soul if not information?

The book goes pretty deep into physics, and has nothing to do with the soul, the afterlife, or reincarnation, but the picture it paints looks to me like it is completely compatible with all those "metaphysical" concepts. Reading this book left me more convinced than ever that the soul is every bit as real as atoms and molecules.

(ON EDIT: another book by the same author: An Introduction to Black Holes, Information And The String Theory Revolution: The Holographic Universe Amazon blurb: Over the last decade the physics of black holes has been revolutionized by developments that grew out of Jacob Bekenstein’s realization that black holes have entropy. Steven Hawking raised profound issues concerning the loss of information in black hole evaporation and the consistency of quantum mechanics in a world with gravity. For two decades these questions puzzled theoretical physicists and eventually led to a revolution in the way we think about space, time, matter and information. This revolution has culminated in a remarkable principle called "The Holographic Principle", which is now a major focus of attention in gravitational research, quantum field theory and elementary particle physics. Leonard Susskind, one of the co-inventors of the Holographic Principle as well as one of the founders of String theory, develops and explains these concepts.)

It has been proven that "information is never destroyed", and what is the soul if not information?

Click to expand...

Following your book links took me on a fascinating journey where I rediscovered things that I hadn't thought about in a very long time.

I wanted to comment on the current thinking that "reality" is probably two dimensional and we are experiencing a three dimensional existence. I have heard it said or read that information on the two dimensional holographic universe is projected into this three dimensional plane. I think it is fascinating to see physicists developing the theories to explain this concept and, at the same time, see the experiment in Europe that looks for gravitational waves find what could be the "pixelation" or "graininess" of our three dimensional reality. I suppose that it may be possible to prove, at least mathematically, that the existence of our originating reality may lie outside of our own three dimensional existence and therefore the soul or the information that is us lies outside of this three dimensional reality also.

If I have got this all muddled, forgive me, because I am not a physicist but just find the concepts thought provoking.

Fiziwig, it is a delight to see you around and so much "in form". Thank you for sharing that. I am quite certain that physics and metaphysics will eventually find the connection. As Einstein said, "either there is no such thing as a miracle, or everything is a miracle". In fact, there are no "miracles", just the Creator's most unimaginable and wonderous "Science"...

Fiziwig, the thought keeps bothering me, so I feel I must ask it again: what is the participation of "thought/consciousness" in the equation? If "observation" can collapse a quantum wave into a particle, how can this happen??? Is it not our "thought/consciousness" that exerts the influence/participation for this to occur?

If God/Soul/Consciousness is imaterial, then considering E = m.c2, if m = 0 we would have to have, by the known laws of physics, a result equal to zero. In other words, zero mass = zero energy. But if we base ourselves on the fact that "energy" was created from nothing, taking as a basis the "Big Bang" theory, how was this energy created???

Could there perhaps be an equation such as:

Consciousness/Soul/Information x Intent Squared = Energy???

I have learned many things throughout my lifetime, but Physics was never the best of my subjects. So taking into consideration my ignorance, could this train of thought hold any ground???

You ask how observation can collapse the wave function. I have to confess, I don't have a clue how consciousness and mass/energy relate to each other. It seems to me, however, that consciousness involves data, but doesn't necessarily have to involve mass or energy. I suspect that consciousness might be something entirely different from mass and energy, and unrelated to them.

But that leaves the question of how consciousness effects mass/energy. If consciousness is all that is real, and mass/energy is just a side effect of consciousness, well then maybe consciousness creates mass/energy in the first place. Who knows?

Thank you for replying, Garry. I really didn't expect an answer to that equation, as you probably know, but wanted to bring forward a good little point to ponder. I reckon if anyone had the answer we would perhaps begin to understand that connection, but I don't think we are anywhere near to that answer yet...

Perhaps "Consciousness" is the "Complete Abstraction" of the quantum field? Who knows, indeed... :thumbsup: